Ancient Greek Language Support
for LibreOffice / OpenOffice

LaserGreek Encoding

The so called LaserGreek encoding is actually an implementation of the following fonts included in LaserGreek II package, by Linguist's Software: GraecaUBS, GreekSans II, Hellenica, HellenicaExtras, Odyssea, OdysseaExtras, OdysseaUBS, Payne, PayneCondensed, TeubnerLS, TeubnerLSC, TeubnerVertical, TeubnerVerticalC. Text written in LaserGreek is called LaserGreek Encoded

Simply put, these fonts are designed in a way to display Greek letters when Latin letters and punctuation marks are typed (much like the freeware SPIonic font). The difference from SPIonic is that it has way much more duplicate characters (these alternative forms of characters are rendered using different horizontal and/or vertical positioning regarding the base of characters), uses ASCII control characters to encode letters and it can use numbers 1-0, which SPIonic cannot.

LaserGreek fonts ^

AncientGreek cannot provide any of the fonts referenced above, since they are part of a proprietary program. If you do need any of these fonts, you can purchase them at the Linguist's Software site.

AncientGreek LaserGreek conversion Macros ^

I suggest saving your work before running either of these macros on a document (no text selection), so that reverting (Menu File / Reload) to it is possible, as Undoing may not be of much help, since a letter by letter substitution will take place resulting in way too many undo steps.

If any of these macros are executed without selecting any text, a warning message similar to the one shown in the following picture will appear.

Warning message on Windows 8.1

• LaserGreekToUnicode Macro

This macro converts text written in LaserGreek to Unicode (normal text that can be edited in LibreOffice / OpenOffice).

• UnicodeToLaserGreek Macro

This macro converts text written in Unicode (normal text edited in LibreOffice / OpenOffice) to LaserGreek.

Several characters will be converted to fullwidth/halfwidth characters before starting the actual conversion to LaserGreek. These characters include "¦", "\", "/", "#", "%", "+", "«", "»" etc. which are used by LaserGreek to represent Ancient Greek letters. These characters will be converted to their original value when converting back to Unicode.

The following table shows the characters substitution that takes place when converting Unicode text to LaserGreek. All substitute characters are fullwidth/halhwidth characters, unless otherwise noted.

* Non fullwidth/halhwidth character.

Most of the accents and diacritics in LaserGreek correspond to composite Unicode characters. For example, the Slash character (/ U+002F) corresponds to Combining Acute Accent (  ́ U+0301). AncientGreek will convert these characters to their precomposed equivalents. So, the Slash character (/ U+002F) will be converted to Greek Tonos (΄ U+0384), when converting "LaserGreek coded content" to Unicode. This way, text produced by the converter will contain precomposed characters only (when applicable).

Using fullwidth characters ^

If the document (or selection) contains ASCII characters (English text), they will automatically be converted to the "fullwidth / halfwidth" characters, when text conversion from Unicode to LaserGreek is performed.

LaserGreek implementation ^

AncientGreek fully implements the encoding as shown in the following table.

Note: In case multiple ASCII Characters can be used to represent an Ancient Greek character, the symbol displayed in bold magenta will be used when converting from Unicode to LaserGreek.

Note: ASCII control characters are displayed in bold green color, using the terms defined at The Unicode Consortium Specification v. 7, followed by their Unicode code.